AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The canvas had been drawn up in great detail. On the paint table beside the chair was the reference photo, the size of an A4 sheet of paper that had been computer printed on glossy paper. Connie looked back at the canvas and studied the outline carefully. “So what do you paint first?” she asked.
“The eyes,” Blake said without hesitation. “They’re the essence of your personality. If I can’t get those right, there’s no point painting anything else because no matter how perfect everything else is rendered, it still won’t be you.”
“Is that normal?” Connie wondered.
“Painting the eyes of a portrait?”
“Yes – painting the most critical part of a canvas first. I thought with oil painting – because the oils take so long to dry – that you would have to work around the canvas in a way that didn’t leave your hand smudging the areas you had completed.”
“Well, painting the critical part of a seascape first isn’t the way I ever approached a canvas,” Blake admitted. “But then a seascape is a composite of so many elements – sky, surf, waves, rocks… they all have their place. A portrait, I think, is different. I can create a seascape and change elements. I can make the sky different, or paint the rocks in a shade different to the reference photo, and no one will ever know. I think a portrait requires more precision – it’s not work for the incompetent or the fearful.”
Connie seemed to understand Blake’s explanation, but she lingered by the easel just to be near him for a few moments longer. The moment he kissed her had haunted her ever since. She still felt little flutters of her heart, like lingering tremors that follow a quake.
His fingers brushed against hers. She seized his hand and squeezed tight. “I have faith in you,” she smiled, and then began plucking at the buttons of her blouse.
Connie went to the window, carefully picked up the rose, and stood in position. The light was different now – the sun had long passed over the house and was slowly setting in the west. She took a deep breath to compose herself, then stood perfectly still.
Blake went across to the counter. There was an old paint-spattered radio on a shelf. He found a station playing classic rock and turned up the music.
“I’ll be doing some color mixing exercises for a while,” he explained. “I’ve never spent any time working with skin tones before – my palette has always been filled with cool colors. So feel free to move around if you like until I can get a handle on shades and shadows. Once I have the colors right I’ll set that all aside and begin on your eyes.”
Blake worked over the palette like an alchemist for an hour, squeezing thick swirls of paint from their tubes, mixing, and then dabbing little touches of the colors directly onto the photograph for comparison. As he worked, Connie gazed out of the window, humming contentedly along to the tunes until he was at last ready for her.
From amidst the rags on his paint table, Blake produced a pair of glasses. The frames were thick and black – the kind of spectacles worn by fashionable movie stars, or struggling authors. He set them on the end of his nose and came to stand close to Connie.
“Look at me,” he said softly.
She swung her eyes to his, lifted her face and gazed at him, her expression so open that he could see the secrets of her soul.
“You have the most beautiful eyes,” he breathed, leaning close enough to kiss her again. “They’re brown, flecked with tawny gold.”
He went back to the canvas then and snatched up the reference photo, studying it with all his attention. At last he grunted, selected a fine-pointed brush with bristles that were soft in his fingers, and began to melt paint onto the canvas.
Blake worked for three hours, absorbed in the challenge of subtly blending shades within the irises, so that time and space seemed to dissolve around him. At last when he looked up, the light through the window was no more than a soft memory of the day that had passed them by. He stood with a stiff groan and arched his aching back.
“I’m out of condition,” he grunted with a regrettable shake of his head.
Connie was impatient. “Can I see?”
She went to the canvas and stared at the eerie image – a pair of isolated eyes, painted to stunning completion, so that they looked as though they had been cut carefully from a photo and fixed to the canvas. She peered close, utterly fascinated, and then frowned. “Are the whites of my eyes really that… that grey-blue color?” there was an edge like horrified panic in her voice.
Blake laughed, and realized how much he enjoyed the sound of it in his own ears. “It’s relative, I assure you,” he grinned. “You’re seeing that color without any reference. When we look at color, our vision draws in all the surrounding shades and sort of blends them together – one tone affects those around it. So if you look at a shade of red in isolation, and then alongside, say blue, the red shade will appear different, even though it is exactly the same color.”
“Is that what’s happening here?” she pointed at the painting.
Blake nodded. “You’re seeing the whites of your eyes without any color around them. Once I get the skin tones painted in, it will make more sense.”
“And I have no eyelashes?”
“Not yet,” Blake explained. “That’s the type of fine detail added at the end of the painting when the flesh around your cheeks and brow are dry.”
Connie nodded thoughtfully and then once again looked up into his face as if now seeking some kind of assurance. “Are you happy with it?” she asked, because it was the most important question of all – the only one that mattered to her right then.
Blake considered the question gravely, narrowing his eyes and inspecting the afternoon’s work one last time with a critical glare. “Yes,” he said at last.
34.
The sunset was masked by dark boiling clouds that came in from the ocean, so that night fell early and thunder rumbled across the sky. A howling wind clawed along the exposed beach, bending the long grasses and shredding the leaves from the trees. Blake stood on the shore with his shirt flattened against his chest and the sand blasting like a thousand tiny needles against his exposed skin. He set the rose into the surf and came away from the churning waterline with the gusting gale pressing like a hand in the middle of his back. A flash of lightning tore the sky apart so that for a split-second he could see the silhouette of Connie and Ned, close together, waiting for him.
They went up through the narrow trail side by side and reached the shelter of the porch before the first drops of rain fell.
“This is just the start of what’s about to come. It will get worse,” Blake said ominously.
A jagged blue fork of lighting shredded the night, seeming to touch the far horizon, and beside him Blake felt Connie tremble with the sudden cold. He put his arm around her and they went inside, closing windows throughout the house as the rain became a constant drumming.
For hours the storm seemed to ebb and flow, crashing down with furious violence and then relenting to an eerie stillness, before coming back once more, with a roar like a wounded beast. Connie fried eggs in the kitchen, glancing out through the window as wind-whipped debris was dashed against the house and the rain at the glass sounded like flung gravel.
At nine o’clock, Ned rose from his bed and went out onto the porch, his eternal vigil begun for the night. Connie glimpsed him through the door, the big dog as docile and unmoving as a sphinx.
“Shouldn’t you call him inside,” Connie fretted. She went to a window and pressed her nose to the glass, watching the Great Dane as rain poured from the flooded guttering and spattered the dog until he was soaked and shivering.
“He won’t move,” Blake said simply and then felt compelled to explain to take the harshness from his words. “This isn’t the first storm we’ve had here, Connie. The dog is stubborn. His loyalty won’t allow him to forsake Chloe, not even on a night like this.”
He brought the old radio from the studio and they turned the music up to drown out the drumming roar of the rain, th
